DJ Premier Breaks Down Gang Starr Discography (Pg. 4)

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By this time, people were saying that I only used jazz samples. And that was cool early on because I used a lot of the jazz records to be different. Everyone else was sampling James Brown and Parliament, including myself at times, so much so that we started running out of the ill funky beats. But people started to over-emphasize the jazz samples and not listen to how dope Gang Starr’s sound was and how we converted it to hard beats. So I said, “You know what? On Hard To Earn I’m going to completely strip it down and use space sounds, helicopters or whatever, just to show it doesn’t matter what I use. And it’s going to be hard.” That’s what I did purposely to prove a point on songs like “Tonz O’ Gonz” and “Mass Appeal.”